The present invention relates to a seedling of moss (bryophyte) usable as a cultigen and a method of producing a dense moss mat by using such seedlings, and more particularly to a moss seedling easily cultivated to a dense colony, and a method of easily producing a dense colony of mosses from the seedlings in a short period of time.
It has been traditionally preferred that the soil of a garden be covered with various plants to create a natural beauty. A typical example of such soil-covering plants is grass, but mosses are much preferred to grass in the Japanese garden.
Though there are mosses tolerant of a direct sunshine, some species of mosses are weakened by exposure to direct sunshine, not adapted for a fertile soil and grow by absorbing moisture in the air through their leaves. Accordingly, attention has recently been paid to the mosses for applications not only in the conventional moss garden, but also in roof garden, etc. Also, they are planted outdoors in hotels, Japanese inns, etc. to create the traditional Japanese atmosphere.
The beauty of the mosses does not originate from flowers unlike floral plants, but it is derived from the dense colony consisting of a large number of individual mosses. However, since the biology of the mosses has been still mostly unknown, it is difficult to cultivate the mosses on a large scale by a usual garden cultivation method. For instance, the cultivation of Racomitrium canescens and Dicranum japonicum can actually be conducted only by highly skilled gardeners.
The conventional cultivation methods of the mosses are generally classified into a transplantation method and a regeneration method.
The transplantation method comprises collecting a desired moss with a soil on which it is growing, and planting it on a desired place. This method is, however, disadvantageous in that it is not suitable for plantating of the moss in a wide area.
The regeneration method, which utilizes the strong regenerating nature of the mosses, may be classified into a cuttage method, a sowing method, a root separation method, etc., and the sowing method is most commonly conducted. In the sowing method, the mat of the moss colony collected in mountains, fields, etc. is separated or divided into each moss plant or small pieces of the moss plant, and planted on a nursery, causing plumules to grow from the separated moss plants or pieces of the divided moss plants, so that they can be multiplied.
However, the sowing method is disadvantageous in that all divided moss plants are rarely regenerated to have plumules, and that even in a case where all divided moss plants are regenerated, it is impossible to sow the divided pieces of the moss plants at a density corresponding to that of the moss colony, resulting in a sparsely grown moss colony at the initial stage. In order to have a dense moss colony, one must wait until lateral buds or gemmae have grown to full size from the subterranean stems. Such growth of the lateral buds or gemmae usually takes several years, during which the moss colony should be well nurtured. Further, in the nursery on a cultivation soil of 30 cm.times.60 cm, one can prepare only two to four cases of the nursery a day, if he works 7 hours a day to sow the divided pieces of the moss plants one by one at a constant interval. This is extremely low efficiency. On the other hand, there are some mosses such as Polytrichum, etc. which grow so rapidly that they can form a colony in about one year. Such mosses, however, have so short a life span as plants that they die in a short period of time. Because of these reasons, moss gardens, moss pots, etc. are extremely expensive.
Since mosses such as Sphagnum have not only good resistance to fungi but also an excellent water retention ability, they are used to cover soils of pots for expensive and weak floral plants and trees such as orchids, bonsai (dwarfed tree), etc., in order to protect the weak plants and trees from harmful fungi and prevent them from extreme dryness. However, if these mosses are collected in the forests and the mountains excessively, the water retention ability of the forests and the mountains would become so low that landslide, flooding, etc. are likely to take place. Further, once the moss colony is removed from the surface of the soil or rock, it takes many years in a natural environment until the surface of the soil or rock is covered by a moss colony again. Thus, to protect the nature of the earth, it is important to keep the moss colony from being excessively removed from the surface of the soil or rock.